"The Turn of the Screw" is purposefully obtuse, and relies on the reader's imagination to create the terror, while Lawrence Wright's account is definitive, comprehensive, and precisely detailed . . . and though you know exactly what happens at the climax, his description of 9/11 is so photo-realistic that it brings back all the terror of that day; in short, when you finish "The Turn of the Screw," you know nothing -- except that human perception is a bewildering puzzle to untangle, while at the end of The Looming Tower, you know why Osama bin Laden was able to get his jihadis to die for him (and now I understand that Arab man who approached my wife and I when we were at a gas station in the vast desert between Syria and Iraq and said, "You like bin Laden?" and then handed me his cell phone, which had a cartoonish graphic of the World Trade Center getting hit by a plane and collapsing, followed by a caricature of bin Laden smiling . . . creepy, especially when you are taking a service taxi, so you can't leave the premises until the driver is done buying candied dates) and now to complete my month of terror, I am going to finish watching Zero Dark Thirty and then watch Argo, both of which I have on Blu-ray from Netflix.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query bin laden. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query bin laden. Sort by date Show all posts
Nothing But Terror
Yesterday, I finished teaching Henry James' ambiguous ghost story "The Turn of the Screw" and I also finished reading The Looming Tower: Al -Qaeda and the Road to 9 / 11 . . . and while both works focus on the theme of terror, they are a study in contrast:
Breaking News! Bin Laden Will Cause Baby Boom!
Mark my words, the death of Osama Bin Laden will cause a mini-baby boom in the United States . . . hearing the story of the triumphant Black Ops mission and the resultant execution of the world's most wanted terrorist will make American males feel potent, virile, and masculine . . . and there is no better patriotic expression of potency, virility, and masculinity than impregnating your wife (except perhaps shooting a hand-gun while riding a jet-ski) and though Americans surely realize this event is only a symbolic end to an abstractly defined, on-going war, they will still view the world as a safer place for children now that Bin Laden is dead; the combined aphrodisiac of military success and optimism for our country's future will lead to some groovy, unprotected love-making . . . so can someone remind me to check the average birth rates next February (which is generally a month with comparatively less births than other months) to see if this half-baked thesis pans out?
Watch Out Guys . . . Here Comes Maya, Carrie and Sarah!
Zero Dark Thirty is intense and usually feels very real (although at times some of Maya's dialogue is action-movie schlock . . . "I'm the motherf*cker who found him . . . I'm going to smoke everyone involved in this op and then I'm going to kill bin Laden") but I think Kathryn Bigelow's previous war movie -- The Hurt Locker -- is much better . . . Zero Dark Thirty recounts an event, and lets us watch how that event unfolds in a most gratuitous fashion, but there's not much beyond that, while The Hurt Locker has a lot more going on under the surface; on a more interesting note, I think there is a new archetypal character in the world of drama: the obsessive and intelligent female working in a world of men, who is the only one who believes in an idea, and is considered far too crazy and too risky to ignore, though no one wants to side completely with her because she's a neurotic, anti-social bitch . . . The Killing, Homeland, and Zero Dark Thirty are all fueled by a female of this archetype: Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison -- the bipolar CIA officer; Mireille Enos as Sarah Linden -- the obsessive and paranoid Seattle detective; and the aforementioned Maya, the young CIA officer who becomes obsessed with stalking bin Laden.
Serendipitous Student Connections #2 (Prank/ Revenge/ Merchant of Venice)
If you're a regular reader, then you are probably acquainted with my new recurring feature (Serendipitous Student Connections) but don't worry if you missed the first episode-- the premise is simple-- sometimes a kid says something in class that is so unexpected that it changes the entire course of the lesson . . . and this doesn't happen that often, because once you've been teaching a number of years, you can predict what most of the responses will be, but once in a while there is the example that surprises you and makes you see the literature in a different light; for instance, in my Shakespeare class, we recently finished 12th Night and are now in the midst of Merchant of Venice, and both these plays have themes of revenge in them (Malvolio's last line in 12th Night is: "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!" which is an odd-- but deserved-- note on which to end a comedy, and Merchant of Venice revolves around Shylock and his desire for a pound of flesh from his anti-Semite rival Antonio) and Shakespeare is smart enough not to choose sides and instead hold a mirror up to the dark side of human nature and the very real and rational desire for vengeance . . . and so when one of my students walked into class and said his life was starting to resemble Merchant of Venice, I knew that his example was going to be good-- this student is a soccer player and he played a prank on one of his soccer buddies: he had all this player's friends text the player a simple "Congratulations" message and then he created a very persuasive but completely fake web page that named his friend the MVP of the Middlesex County Soccer Tournament-- and his victim, like Malvolio, was a rule-following honorable soul who had played well enough to be deserving of such a title-- and because of this, the victim fell for the article hook, line, and sinker . . . and at this point my student realized that he had to tell the truth to his friend, before he started telling everyone about his "award," which was fictitiously created and digitally distributed on a fabricated web page . . . but when he told his buddy about the prank, he attempted to set the rules of revenge-- he knew his friend would have to seek revenge but he wanted to control exactly how his friend would punish him-- and this is exactly what happens in Merchant of Venice-- but of course it is difficult to dictate vengeance and emotions in contractual terms-- and so my student, who is much smaller than his victim, persuaded his victim that though he absolutely deserved revenge for this emotionally humiliating prank, that the revenge couldn't be physical (because the victim could easily beat up the perpetrator, he's a much larger kid) and had to be in the same genre as his prank-- emotional-- but I explained to him that in the milieu of vengeance, the rules are always broken . . . Osama bin Laden wanted to liberate Muslim holy sites and get revenge for American influence in Saudi Arabia so he blew up civilians in an office tower . . . and then the United States invaded and decimated two entire countries to exact our revenge against bin Laden . . . Whitney and I threw some apples at a door in our fraternity house and it started a cycle of revenge that ended in a friend nailing a dead raccoon to someone's door . . . and so the cycle of revenge is never predictable and never reasonable, and-- as Shakespeare illustrates-- sometimes it takes a woman to put an end to the silliness, because women never hold a grudge . . . right?
2/25/10
I just started Lee Smith's new book on Middle East politics called The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations; he is refuting the thesis that anti-Americanism in the Arab world is a product of government propaganda and an opinion of a few terrorists and dictators, and that it is more endemic in the culture, which is still very tribal at the core-- and this reminds me of a time, probably in 2002, when we were in the Western Desert between Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, on our way to Amman in a service taxi, and we stopped for gas at a godforsaken station and while we were browsing candy bars, a guy asked my wife, "You like bin Laden?" and then showed her his cell phone screen: on it there was a simple cartoon of a plane hitting the World Trade Center followed by a laughing Osama face.
Where Men Win Glory: Jalalabad, Not Dallas
Another Free Idea . . . And I Did The Hard Part
So our on-line digital experience is becoming more and more concise; web-pages are difficult to wade through, blogs have consolidated some of this information into manageable nuggets, Facebook pared things down more, and Twitter seemed to be the end result: with its 140 character limit, brevity truly is the soul of wit . . . but I think there's room for one more application, one more level down on the communication ladder, and I call it GRUNT! and this platform will allow you to send a three second sound with a short title to your followers: perhaps you would GRUNT! the sound "yee-ha!" with the title "Bin Laden is Dead!" or "blah" with the title "Monday Morning" or "yum" attached to a local restaurant, and, of course, there's no way text can do these sounds justice-- as the expressive of a sound is infinite and unlimited-- and a GRUNT! conveys an amazing amount of information in a short space (and also don't require much literacy) and so I think this is the future of communication . . . now I've done the hard part in this process and thought of the idea . . . all you need to do is raise the capital, write the code, design the web-pages, market the application, and run the company.
Stryper Never Made It to Saudi Arabia
One of the most disturbing things I have learned while reading Lawrence Wright's book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11 is that if Osama Bin Laden heard music, he would literally plug his ears, and he declared that "music is the flute of the devil."
A Case For Reading Novels (With Some Help from Steven Johnson andGeorge Eliot)
Two roads diverge in a yellow wood . . . which one do you take?
You have time to ponder. You're not being chased by a lion, tiger, or bear. So do you choose the road less traveled by? Or head down the well trodden one? Either way, your choice will make all the difference.
You have time to ponder. You're not being chased by a lion, tiger, or bear. So do you choose the road less traveled by? Or head down the well trodden one? Either way, your choice will make all the difference.
Steven Johnson discusses these life-altering moments in his new book Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. He thinks we are woefully unprepared for these kinds of choices. He's probably right. We read "The Road Not Taken" in my Creative Writing class, and then we discuss times when we made these kinds of decisions. We all readily concede that once you journey down a particular fork in the road, you probably won't backtrack and take another path, but I don't advise them prescriptively on how to navigate these crucial moments. Instead, I present them with a literary example. We read it, discuss it, and run through the variables and options. It turns out-- according to Steven Johnson-- that this may be the best tactic imaginable.
I use an example from a book of anecdotes and recipes called Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. It's not fiction, but for folks in suburban New Jersey in 2019, it might as well be. It's damn close to a time travel story. If you haven't guessed, Mildred Armstrong Kalish is very old. She's 96. Coincidentally, my grandmother also goes by Mildred (though her Christian name is Carmella) and she's also 96.
When Mildred was a child, Aunt Belle tells her a story.
Once, before Aunt Belle died, I got up enough courage to ask her a very personal question.
"Aunt Belle, how come you never got married?"
She looked at me for a long time. She was standing by the kitchen stove, her delicate hands clasping and unclasping the stove handle, and she told me the following story:
"Well, I did have one beau. He told Art (her brother and my grandpa) to tell me Barkis is willin' and that he would be over Saturday night. Well, that made me so mad! I thought he had a lot of nerve asking me to marry him through Art like that! So when he came over Saturday night I wouldn't take his hat; I wouldn't take his coat. I wouldn't ask him to sit down. I treated him just as cold. I treated him so bad he never came back."
She stood absolutely still for a long time; then she continued:
"I'm kind of sorry I was so cold to him; he went and married Abbie Cross, made her a good home and was a good husband to her. They had a nice family."
She remained contemplative for a while and then continued, "It's been kind of lonesome sometimes."
Talk about roads not taken.
Aunt Belle obviously regrets her decision. She made it out of spite, and-- by choosing a moment of indignant retribution over a lifetime of possible happiness/contentedness -- she impulsively inverts Pascal's famous wager. After we read this, I remind my students that they are lucky to live in a densely populated area, where they will have plenty of opportunities for courtship and marriage. They probably won't have to resort to marrying a first cousin (which is apparently legal in New Jersey) but in Depression-era Iowa the pickin's were slim.
I learned an easy technique to help with this decision-making-dilemma on The Art of Manliness (Podcast #465: The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead) The guest, Warren Berger, suggests imagining yourself in the new scenario-- whether it be a new house, a new marriage, a new location, a new wife, a new job. Really vividly imagine this new life. And then ask yourself: would you go back to your old life? Would you make the switch in reverse?
Or perhaps you could follow the advice of way-finding guru Dave Evans and do some "odyssey planning." This involves imagining three possible lives that you could genuinely live and sincerely considering all of them. Recognizing that there is no "one true path" for you to tread so you can engage in all the possibilities.
Many times we get hung up on the small details and anxiety of change, and fail to think about the consequences of the actual decision. Aunt Belle got hung up on the way Art asked her to marry, but she never imagined married life with Art and compared this long-term scenario to spinster-life on a farm in Depression-era Iowa. If she had done that, she might have overlooked Art's graceless go-between proposal and thought more about the big picture.
I'm an English teacher, and I often wonder if my job is bullshit. Do kids really need to read Beowulf? The answer might be no. Lately, the Language Arts curriculum has been moving toward more practical coursework, non-fiction texts, and synthesis essays. I see the value in this. But the Johnson book validates the traditional inclination of English class: reading novels. The ideas he presents feel groundbreaking and pushing them on both my students and my colleagues. Sometimes we need a reminder of why it's worth it to read literature with kids. While there is a myriad of reasons to do this, Johnson makes the compelling case that people faced with big decisions should hone their skills by reading literary fiction. I'll explain why later in the post, but someone should pass this advice along to our fearless leader, Donald Trump. According to this list, Trump is not a fan of fiction, literary or otherwise.
Johnson made Middlemarch sound so intriguing-- despite the fact that it's a 900 page Victorian novel-- that I decided to read it in tandem with Farsighted. This was no easy task, and while I recommend Middlemarch, I definitely had to use the internet to understand several parts. It's often dense. The sentences are beautiful, but often long and wandering. I'm guessing you're not going to read it (and the synopsis in Farsighted will suffice) but I still should warn you that there will be spoilers ahead.
Many years ago, my friend and colleague Dan saw me reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I was five hundred pages in.
"Why are you reading that?" he asked me. "She's just going to throw herself in front of a train."
"What? Why did you tell me that!"
"Everyone knows that," he said.
I did not know that.
At its core, Dorothea's choice is simply binary: Should she marry Ladislaw or not? But Eliot allows us to see the rich web of influence and consequences that surrounds that decision. A full spectrum map of the novel would look something like this:
MIND → FAMILY → CAREER → COMMUNITY → ECONOMY → TECHNOLOGY → HISTORY
In Middlemarch, each of these levels plays a defining role in the story.
Johnson then points out the difference in scope between Middlemarch and a more narrowly bound (but still wonderful) literary novel like Pride and Prejudice. We get insight into the personal lives of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, but we are "limited to the upper realm of the scale diagram: the emotional connections between the two lovers, and the apparent approval or disapproval of their immediate family and a handful of neighbors." Mary Anne Evans goes all the way. Things get so complicated that all we can do is what Dorothea does: "wait and think anew."
Great novels don't give us prescriptions for what to do in complex situations. They are not morality plays or fables. There is no set of invariable rules. Once again, Johnson explains this better than I can:
Great novels-- or at least novels that are not didactic in their moralizing-- give us something fundamentally similar to what we get out of simulations of war games or ensemble forecasts: they let us experience parallel lives, and see the complexity of those experiences in vivid detail. They let us see the choice in all its intricacies. They map all the thread-like pressures; they chart the impact pathways as the choice ripples through families, communities, and the wider society. They give us practice, not prepackaged instructions.
It's a lot easier to read literary novels than it is to amass the experiences within them. My buddy Whitney recently reflected on these moments in a numerically epic post . . . he's lived a life that might encompass several novels, and so he's got more moments like this under his belt than most folks. Most of us don't get this much practice, and Johnson suggests that the next best thing is to ingest fiction, things that never happened.
Why fiction? Why not stick to the facts? We could spend out lives in the world of reality, watching documentaries and reading non-fiction, and never want for compelling stories. Why involve ourselves in lives and worlds and decisions that don't exist? Johnson takes a guess: "Stories exercise and rehearse the facility for juggling different frames of truth, in part, because they themselves occupy a complicated position on the map of truth and falsehood, and in part because stories often involve us observing other (fictional) beings going through their own juggling act."
We can run our limited perspective through many other minds and fictional lives, hypothesizing both about the reality of truthfulness of that world and the reality and truthfulness of the decision making within it. It's why I love Middlemarch and Brothers Karamazov and it's why I think the TV show Ozark -- though it's well acted, set in an interesting location, and looks like quality work-- might be totally stupid. Something is off with the simulation. There's a glitch in the matrix. There's something foggy floating in the suspension of disbelief.
The new novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green, handles this in an incredibly in-your-face manner. While the book is ostensibly a first-contact, robots-from-space sci-fi story, the irony is that the weirdest, most alien technology is actually the social-media-verse created by the humans. April May, the heroically awkward anti-hero, has to navigate her viral first contact fame and make several big decisions about the arc of her life. The novel inhabits the same space maturity-wise as the works by John Green, the author's brother. The story is sophisticated enough for adults to enjoy it, but the portrayal of politics and the dialogue can be a little schlocky. And the ending devolves into more of a Ready Player One puzzle-fest. While the book is probably more suited for a an advanced young-adult reader, I still like how it tackles decision-making . . . it literally exemplifies Johnson's reason for reading fiction. Here's how April May breaks down her first big moment:
Option 1 (the sane option):
I could detach from all this as much as possible. Stop doing TV things, definitely do not meet a strange science girl at Walmart in Southern California to buy smoke detectors, never do anything on the internet again, pay off my loans. Buy a big house with a gate with the licensing revenue that would, no doubt, if this were real, keep flowing for the entire rest of my life, and have dinner parties with clever people until I died.
Option 2 (the not-sane option):
Keep doing TV, spice up my Twitter and my Instagram and have opinions. Basically, use the platform that I was given by random chance to have a voice and maybe make a difference. What kind of difference? I had no idea, but I did know another chance wasn't going to come along . . . ever.
Hank Green
I'm going to let Steven Johnson finish this post off, with an especially long passage that I really think you should read. I made my students read it, and I gave it to a number of English teachers in my department. It's a great explanation of why we should spend time reading novels . . . literary novels. What designates a "literary" novel is another question for another post, but for now we can use the same benchmark that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to recognize hard-core pornography. He said he couldn't easily define it but, "I know it when I see it." The same goes for literature. As long as it's not "shallow and pedantic," then I think anything goes.
The novel is a better tool for simulating decision-making than a movie or TV show. Images move too fast and we never get to truly inhabit the interior of a character's mind. A novel allows for turning back and contemplation. It allows you to stop and hypothesize whenever you like. It's literally your world. Netflix tried to emulate a bit of this contemplative freedom with the choose-your-own-adventure Black Mirror episode "Bandersnatch", and while it was fun to make the choices, the story felt a bit contrived, and you never felt the threads and pressures that George Eliot portrays with such accuracy. You just picked a path so you could see what happened. The stakes were low. But when you invest in a challenging novel, and really live inside it, then profound things might happen.
This is the other reason novel reading turns out to enhance our decision-making skills . . . many studies have confirmed that a lifelong habit of reading literary fiction correlates strongly with an enhanced theory of mind skills. We don't know if other-minded people are drawn to literary fiction, or if the act of reading actually improves their ability to build those mental models. Most likely, it is a bit of both. But whatever the causal relationship, it is clear that one of the defining experiences of reading literary novels involves the immersion in an alternate subjectivity . . . The novel is an empathy machine. We can imagine all sorts of half-truths and hypotheticals: what-she-will-think-if-this-happens, what-he-thinks-I'm-feeling. Reading literary novels trains the mind for that kind of analysis. You can't run a thousand parallel simulations of your own life, the way meteorologists do, but you can read a thousand novels over the course of that life. It's true that the stories that unfold in those novels do not directly mirror the stories in our own lives. Most of us will never confront a choice between our late husband's estate and the matrimonial bliss with our radical lover. But the point of reading this kind of literary fiction is not to acquire a ready-made formula for your own hard choices. If you are contemplating a move to the suburbs, Middlemarch does not tell you what to do. No form of outside advice-- whether it takes the form of a novel or a cognitive science study or pop-psychology paperback-- can tell you what to do on these kinds of situations, because these situations contain, by definition, their own unique configuration of threadlike pressures. What the novel--along with some of the other forms of mapping and simulating that we have explored-- does teach you to do is to see the situation with what Eliot called "a keen vision and feeling," and keep you from the tendency to "walk about well wadded with stupidity." The novel doesn't give you answers. But it does make you better at following the threads . . . more than any other creative form, novels give us an opportunity to simulate and rehearse the hard choices of life before we actually make one ourselves. They give us an unrivaled vista into the interior life of someone wrestling with a complex, multi-layered choice, even if the choice happens to be a fictional one . . . the path of a human life, changing and being changed by the world around it.
Steven Johnson
Aunt Belle's Two Roads
I use an example from a book of anecdotes and recipes called Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. It's not fiction, but for folks in suburban New Jersey in 2019, it might as well be. It's damn close to a time travel story. If you haven't guessed, Mildred Armstrong Kalish is very old. She's 96. Coincidentally, my grandmother also goes by Mildred (though her Christian name is Carmella) and she's also 96.
When Mildred was a child, Aunt Belle tells her a story.
Once, before Aunt Belle died, I got up enough courage to ask her a very personal question.
"Aunt Belle, how come you never got married?"
She looked at me for a long time. She was standing by the kitchen stove, her delicate hands clasping and unclasping the stove handle, and she told me the following story:
"Well, I did have one beau. He told Art (her brother and my grandpa) to tell me Barkis is willin' and that he would be over Saturday night. Well, that made me so mad! I thought he had a lot of nerve asking me to marry him through Art like that! So when he came over Saturday night I wouldn't take his hat; I wouldn't take his coat. I wouldn't ask him to sit down. I treated him just as cold. I treated him so bad he never came back."
She stood absolutely still for a long time; then she continued:
"I'm kind of sorry I was so cold to him; he went and married Abbie Cross, made her a good home and was a good husband to her. They had a nice family."
She remained contemplative for a while and then continued, "It's been kind of lonesome sometimes."
Talk about roads not taken.
Aunt Belle obviously regrets her decision. She made it out of spite, and-- by choosing a moment of indignant retribution over a lifetime of possible happiness/contentedness -- she impulsively inverts Pascal's famous wager. After we read this, I remind my students that they are lucky to live in a densely populated area, where they will have plenty of opportunities for courtship and marriage. They probably won't have to resort to marrying a first cousin (which is apparently legal in New Jersey) but in Depression-era Iowa the pickin's were slim.
We're Talking About Practice
Big decisions are tough. We don't get enough practice. Most people only get married once . . . or twice . . . but rarely thrice. The same goes for buying a home. I got lucky with my marriage, but we all know the divorce rates; marriage is a coin-flip. Buying a home is similar (and often simultaneous). If I had more practice with home buying, I would have checked out the concrete more thoroughly. I would have been more annoyed by the basement crawl space. I would have found the roof suspect. I would have known just what an ordeal it is to redo a kitchen. But I knew none of this, and simply liked the location and the deck. Next time . . . if there is one, I will be more discerning.I learned an easy technique to help with this decision-making-dilemma on The Art of Manliness (Podcast #465: The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead) The guest, Warren Berger, suggests imagining yourself in the new scenario-- whether it be a new house, a new marriage, a new location, a new wife, a new job. Really vividly imagine this new life. And then ask yourself: would you go back to your old life? Would you make the switch in reverse?
Or perhaps you could follow the advice of way-finding guru Dave Evans and do some "odyssey planning." This involves imagining three possible lives that you could genuinely live and sincerely considering all of them. Recognizing that there is no "one true path" for you to tread so you can engage in all the possibilities.
Many times we get hung up on the small details and anxiety of change, and fail to think about the consequences of the actual decision. Aunt Belle got hung up on the way Art asked her to marry, but she never imagined married life with Art and compared this long-term scenario to spinster-life on a farm in Depression-era Iowa. If she had done that, she might have overlooked Art's graceless go-between proposal and thought more about the big picture.
Advice for the President
The most notable thing about Steven Johnson's Farsighted is that he lauds the power of literary novels to help us imagine and simulate these big decisions. Johnson also has more typical fare in the book: the history of weather forecasting and the theoretical, strategic, and tactical planning of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But his main example is George Eliot's Middlemarch.I'm an English teacher, and I often wonder if my job is bullshit. Do kids really need to read Beowulf? The answer might be no. Lately, the Language Arts curriculum has been moving toward more practical coursework, non-fiction texts, and synthesis essays. I see the value in this. But the Johnson book validates the traditional inclination of English class: reading novels. The ideas he presents feel groundbreaking and pushing them on both my students and my colleagues. Sometimes we need a reminder of why it's worth it to read literature with kids. While there is a myriad of reasons to do this, Johnson makes the compelling case that people faced with big decisions should hone their skills by reading literary fiction. I'll explain why later in the post, but someone should pass this advice along to our fearless leader, Donald Trump. According to this list, Trump is not a fan of fiction, literary or otherwise.
Victorian Spoilers Ahead!
Johnson made Middlemarch sound so intriguing-- despite the fact that it's a 900 page Victorian novel-- that I decided to read it in tandem with Farsighted. This was no easy task, and while I recommend Middlemarch, I definitely had to use the internet to understand several parts. It's often dense. The sentences are beautiful, but often long and wandering. I'm guessing you're not going to read it (and the synopsis in Farsighted will suffice) but I still should warn you that there will be spoilers ahead. Many years ago, my friend and colleague Dan saw me reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I was five hundred pages in.
"Why are you reading that?" he asked me. "She's just going to throw herself in front of a train."
"What? Why did you tell me that!"
"Everyone knows that," he said.
I did not know that.
When in Doubt, Wait and Think Anew
The biggest decision (among many big decisions) in Middlemarch is whether recently widowed Dorothea Casaubon should follow the codicil in her dead husband's will and lose her fortune, or ignore the codicil and marry the man she truly loves . . . a man her dead husband despised. Mary Anne Evans doesn't make it easy. She details all the forces that might weigh on a life decision of this magnitude. Johnson explains charts these forces:At its core, Dorothea's choice is simply binary: Should she marry Ladislaw or not? But Eliot allows us to see the rich web of influence and consequences that surrounds that decision. A full spectrum map of the novel would look something like this:
MIND → FAMILY → CAREER → COMMUNITY → ECONOMY → TECHNOLOGY → HISTORY
In Middlemarch, each of these levels plays a defining role in the story.
Johnson then points out the difference in scope between Middlemarch and a more narrowly bound (but still wonderful) literary novel like Pride and Prejudice. We get insight into the personal lives of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, but we are "limited to the upper realm of the scale diagram: the emotional connections between the two lovers, and the apparent approval or disapproval of their immediate family and a handful of neighbors." Mary Anne Evans goes all the way. Things get so complicated that all we can do is what Dorothea does: "wait and think anew."
Great novels don't give us prescriptions for what to do in complex situations. They are not morality plays or fables. There is no set of invariable rules. Once again, Johnson explains this better than I can:
Great novels-- or at least novels that are not didactic in their moralizing-- give us something fundamentally similar to what we get out of simulations of war games or ensemble forecasts: they let us experience parallel lives, and see the complexity of those experiences in vivid detail. They let us see the choice in all its intricacies. They map all the thread-like pressures; they chart the impact pathways as the choice ripples through families, communities, and the wider society. They give us practice, not prepackaged instructions.
It's a lot easier to read literary novels than it is to amass the experiences within them. My buddy Whitney recently reflected on these moments in a numerically epic post . . . he's lived a life that might encompass several novels, and so he's got more moments like this under his belt than most folks. Most of us don't get this much practice, and Johnson suggests that the next best thing is to ingest fiction, things that never happened.
Just the Fiction, Ma'am
Why fiction? Why not stick to the facts? We could spend out lives in the world of reality, watching documentaries and reading non-fiction, and never want for compelling stories. Why involve ourselves in lives and worlds and decisions that don't exist? Johnson takes a guess: "Stories exercise and rehearse the facility for juggling different frames of truth, in part, because they themselves occupy a complicated position on the map of truth and falsehood, and in part because stories often involve us observing other (fictional) beings going through their own juggling act."
Glitch in the Matrix?
We can run our limited perspective through many other minds and fictional lives, hypothesizing both about the reality of truthfulness of that world and the reality and truthfulness of the decision making within it. It's why I love Middlemarch and Brothers Karamazov and it's why I think the TV show Ozark -- though it's well acted, set in an interesting location, and looks like quality work-- might be totally stupid. Something is off with the simulation. There's a glitch in the matrix. There's something foggy floating in the suspension of disbelief.
The new novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green, handles this in an incredibly in-your-face manner. While the book is ostensibly a first-contact, robots-from-space sci-fi story, the irony is that the weirdest, most alien technology is actually the social-media-verse created by the humans. April May, the heroically awkward anti-hero, has to navigate her viral first contact fame and make several big decisions about the arc of her life. The novel inhabits the same space maturity-wise as the works by John Green, the author's brother. The story is sophisticated enough for adults to enjoy it, but the portrayal of politics and the dialogue can be a little schlocky. And the ending devolves into more of a Ready Player One puzzle-fest. While the book is probably more suited for a an advanced young-adult reader, I still like how it tackles decision-making . . . it literally exemplifies Johnson's reason for reading fiction. Here's how April May breaks down her first big moment:
Option 1 (the sane option):
I could detach from all this as much as possible. Stop doing TV things, definitely do not meet a strange science girl at Walmart in Southern California to buy smoke detectors, never do anything on the internet again, pay off my loans. Buy a big house with a gate with the licensing revenue that would, no doubt, if this were real, keep flowing for the entire rest of my life, and have dinner parties with clever people until I died.
Option 2 (the not-sane option):
Keep doing TV, spice up my Twitter and my Instagram and have opinions. Basically, use the platform that I was given by random chance to have a voice and maybe make a difference. What kind of difference? I had no idea, but I did know another chance wasn't going to come along . . . ever.
Hank Green
Don't Be Shallow and Pedantic
I'm going to let Steven Johnson finish this post off, with an especially long passage that I really think you should read. I made my students read it, and I gave it to a number of English teachers in my department. It's a great explanation of why we should spend time reading novels . . . literary novels. What designates a "literary" novel is another question for another post, but for now we can use the same benchmark that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to recognize hard-core pornography. He said he couldn't easily define it but, "I know it when I see it." The same goes for literature. As long as it's not "shallow and pedantic," then I think anything goes.
The novel is a better tool for simulating decision-making than a movie or TV show. Images move too fast and we never get to truly inhabit the interior of a character's mind. A novel allows for turning back and contemplation. It allows you to stop and hypothesize whenever you like. It's literally your world. Netflix tried to emulate a bit of this contemplative freedom with the choose-your-own-adventure Black Mirror episode "Bandersnatch", and while it was fun to make the choices, the story felt a bit contrived, and you never felt the threads and pressures that George Eliot portrays with such accuracy. You just picked a path so you could see what happened. The stakes were low. But when you invest in a challenging novel, and really live inside it, then profound things might happen.
This is the other reason novel reading turns out to enhance our decision-making skills . . . many studies have confirmed that a lifelong habit of reading literary fiction correlates strongly with an enhanced theory of mind skills. We don't know if other-minded people are drawn to literary fiction, or if the act of reading actually improves their ability to build those mental models. Most likely, it is a bit of both. But whatever the causal relationship, it is clear that one of the defining experiences of reading literary novels involves the immersion in an alternate subjectivity . . . The novel is an empathy machine. We can imagine all sorts of half-truths and hypotheticals: what-she-will-think-if-this-happens, what-he-thinks-I'm-feeling. Reading literary novels trains the mind for that kind of analysis. You can't run a thousand parallel simulations of your own life, the way meteorologists do, but you can read a thousand novels over the course of that life. It's true that the stories that unfold in those novels do not directly mirror the stories in our own lives. Most of us will never confront a choice between our late husband's estate and the matrimonial bliss with our radical lover. But the point of reading this kind of literary fiction is not to acquire a ready-made formula for your own hard choices. If you are contemplating a move to the suburbs, Middlemarch does not tell you what to do. No form of outside advice-- whether it takes the form of a novel or a cognitive science study or pop-psychology paperback-- can tell you what to do on these kinds of situations, because these situations contain, by definition, their own unique configuration of threadlike pressures. What the novel--along with some of the other forms of mapping and simulating that we have explored-- does teach you to do is to see the situation with what Eliot called "a keen vision and feeling," and keep you from the tendency to "walk about well wadded with stupidity." The novel doesn't give you answers. But it does make you better at following the threads . . . more than any other creative form, novels give us an opportunity to simulate and rehearse the hard choices of life before we actually make one ourselves. They give us an unrivaled vista into the interior life of someone wrestling with a complex, multi-layered choice, even if the choice happens to be a fictional one . . . the path of a human life, changing and being changed by the world around it.
Steven Johnson
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